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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28559529">White Sun Summers</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/davaia/pseuds/davaia'>davaia</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst and Feels, Blood and Injury, Domestic, Drama &amp; Romance, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, M/M, Nicky is the arbiter of Italian culture and Columbus isn't invited, No beta we die like Merrick axed in the neck and plummeting from the monument of our own hubris, Post-Movie: The Old Guard (2020), Soft Husbands, dramatic love declarations every hour on the hour, flashbacks of developing relationship, flashbacks of enemies to friends to lovers, the emotional and physical aftermath of the gunshot</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-11 01:02:16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>15,952</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28559529</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/davaia/pseuds/davaia</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Since you woke up on that floor, I have died a thousand invisible deaths from my terror. Every lingering hurt you endure, I think—is this it?"</i>
</p><p>Joe and Nicky go home to heal.<br/><br/></p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>182</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>542</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>White Sun Summers</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>My first TOG story! I just wanted to write about how much they love each other and then write even more and more and more about how much they love each other.</p><p>Also: I tried my best with the Italian dialogue. Translations of what I intended are in the end-notes, but if there are any native speakers out there with corrections, please feel free to leave them in the comments!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>Nicky’s peeling pears at the sink when Joe gets home.
</p><p>It’s early evening. The TV is playing something relaxing and mindless in the background. <i>Antiques Roadshow</i>, Joe’s brain automatically supplies. There’s a Ming Dynasty vase on the screen that looks like the pencil holder on his desk. Nicky isn’t watching it. He’s barefoot, dressed in worn oatmeal colored pants and a linen shirt that billows on his frame. The cloth is dark with sweat between his shoulder blades.
</p><p>They’re at their cottage near Camogli. They have a quiet, seclusive plot on one of the town’s steep cliffsides, a set of rickety stairs leading down to the sea and a sliver of rocky shoreline. Genoa proper’s a little too crowded these days—too many <i>sights-sounds-smells</i> that overwhelm what the city used to be for them. What it used to be for Nicky. Sometimes it’s easier to avoid it, just so they can preserve it in their own way.
</p><p>"It’s hot as hell in here." Joe sloughs his heavy grocery bags off—cotton, reusable, from MoMA—and onto the plain kitchen table. "Why’s the AC off?"
</p><p>Nicky doesn’t answer. His eyes are closed, head tilted to the side, face upturned to the gloaming, saturated sunlight coming in through the open window. His broad hands are lax on the countertop, paring knife loose in his grip. Lips parted, he’s murmuring silently to himself.
</p><p>A little sharper this time. "Nicky?"
</p><p>"I can’t…" Nicky utters, brow furrowing. He’s speaking in Ligurian. "I…"
</p><p>Joe presses up behind Nicky, settles his hands at his husband’s waist, resting above the jut of his hip bones. Nicky’s lost weight. Not much, but he’s still losing it. The more he does, the more energy his body expends trying to heal him back to full strength. It doesn’t take much to turn his love’s form into sharp angles and shadowy hollows. It happens. That’s why they’re here.
</p><p>"Can’t what?" Joe prompts quietly. He kisses the back of Nicky’s neck. "Talk to me."
</p><p>"Did I—propose to you here?" Nicky asks. "Like this?"
</p><p>Joe hums thoughtfully, understanding now what this is. "Almost," he says and hitches his arms tighter, higher. He hooks his chin on Nicky’s shoulder and lets their heads rest together, feeling Nicky instinctively settling his weight against him.
</p><p>"Almost propose?" Nicky might be teasing him now.
</p><p>"Almost like this," Joe amends. "It was already dark. Hot like it is now."
</p><p>"Yes," Nicky murmurs. His brow twitches, eyes still closed. 
</p><p>Joe nuzzles close into the side of Nicky’s neck, fitting himself to every part of the man, hip-to-hip, chest-to-back, held tight there. "Back in the—"
</p><p>"Sixties."
</p><p>"Yeah," Joe breathes out. "This place was still a dump. Just a rundown fishing shack. We bought it and the land for practically nothing, right after we bungled that op in Spain."
</p><p>"You were hurt on that one," says Nicky. "Terribly. I remember—I…"
</p><p>"Tell me."
</p><p>"I remember feeling the loss of you for weeks. <i>Months</i>. You were fine, you were by my side, but the fear of it—the terror of that moment, thinking it was the last time—even the thought of it was enough to stop my heart." His fingers close around Joe’s arm.
</p><p>Joe makes a noise of acknowledgement. The hard truth of it is that the fear of losing one another never gets easier to bear, only grows as deep as they grow old. But they don’t need to talk about that tonight. "We’d just finished fixing the roof, and it was miserably hot that summer. So we went down to the beach and drank enough wine to drown a man. And you asked me to be your husband, and I told you we’d already gotten married a dozen times over, and you said—"
</p><p>"Not gotten married on that beach, at that time of night before." Nicky’s shoulders are relaxing as they rebuild the memory together. "And you told me yes. Then we—"
</p><p>"Fucked until my dick nearly fell off."
</p><p>Nicky’s back jerks with a silent laugh. "I thought you were the poet between us," he admonishes with that tiny, lopsided smile of his. He opens his eyes and turns in Joe’s arms, drawing his juice-sticky hands up between them to rest on Joe’s chest. He looks so, so tired.
</p><p>"Oh, it was poetry alright," Joe teases. His expression softens and he bumps his nose against Nicky’s. Then he lets go of Nicky’s waist just to cup his face, thumbs rubbing over the bruise-dark circles under his eyes. The green-grey of Nicky’s irises looks like ice next to the color. "How’s your head?"
</p><p>Nicky grimaces, which is answer enough. "Read to me tonight?"
</p><p>That could mean any number of things. <i>Migraine, blurred vision, vertigo, fatigue, brain fog—</i>
</p><p>Joe runs his hand over the back of Nicky’s head, whole and sound, not blown open on a concrete floor; his hair dry and clean, not matted with gore and spinal fluid, his own brains and skull fragments. Joe knows better—Nicky’s not out of the woods just yet. Brains and spines are tricky, messy things. 
</p><p>"Always," Joe replies, and tempers the moment with a crooked grin.
</p><p>"Good," says Nicky, his own smile back, small and a little sad as if he knows Joe’s thoughts and <i>oh</i>, Joe loves this man. <i>He loves this man</i>. His heart <i>aches</i> with the force of it, saturates his blood and his bones with love a thousand years in the making and more until the only thing which keeps him whole and healed is <i>Nicolò</i>.
</p><p>Nicky drums his fingers on Joe’s chest. "Did you get burrata?"
</p><p>Joe kisses him. 
</p><p>It’s deep, slow and sweet. He shuts his eyes and embraces Nicky with every one of his senses—the warmth of his skin, the taste of him, the faint, almost confused exhalation of his breath, the way he leans into it—all of these things never old, a gift to Joe every single time. He draws back with a damp sound, just enough to say, "I love you, hayati. If there is no purpose to this life beyond spending every day of it at your side, that is enough."
</p><p>"<i>Yusuf</i>. All I did was ask about the cheese," Nicky says, but his voice sounds thin and when he glances up again his eyes are wet.
</p><p>Joe makes carbonara for dinner, loaded with cheese and eggs and crispy-salty guanciale. Fennel roasted with fresh herbs, slices of summer tomato with sea salt and olive oil they’d bought in Crete, fresh table bread bought down the road. Nicky poaches the pears in white wine and honey and cardamom, serves them warm with the burrata for dessert.
</p><p>Two men unknown to the world in their little house by the sea, eating finer than the kings and sultans of their day. They’ve long since shaken off the moralizing guilt of abundance, starved to death just enough to know things should be enjoyed while they can.
</p><p>"No more," Joe finally groans in satisfaction, slumping back in his chair. "You’ll have to roll me into bed tonight. I’ll sleep for a <i>week</i>."
</p><p>It’s dark outside, the night sky clear-bright with stars through their open kitchen window. The AC is still off, the air in the room heavy, sticky, sweet with the lingering smell of honey and wine. 
</p><p>Nicky is smiling.

</p><p><br/>
</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
</p><p>They do the dishes together with Nicky washing and Joe drying. They never got around to putting a dishwasher in. They’ve worked side by side in menial, domestic tasks like this—preparing meals, building fires, sharpening swords, packing ammunition—for so long that it didn’t really occur to them they could go automated.
</p><p>They have a fancy washer and dryer for the laundry, though, mostly because Nicky still gives him shit for drowning in an icy river that one time in France. Yusuf had succumbed twice to the water and once to hypothermia before Nicky had managed to pry him out of a snowbank and defrost him by the fireplace in their cramped, rented room in Annecy. The memory is actually pretty pleasant after that.
</p><p>Joe takes a plate and bumps Nicky with his hip. "You set them up and I finish them off," he says with a snicker.
</p><p>"These are Royal Copenhagen, my heart. They are the nice ones," Nicky says primly, a little imperious even when he’s elbows-deep in soap bubbles. "You may shoot the glassware, though. Those I do not have an attachment to."
</p><p>Nicky’s teasing him and joking around, but he’s also slumping, leaning heavily against the sink—exhausted by jet-lag and life in general as of late, so Joe finally just shoos him off to take a shower while he scrubs out the last of the pans.
</p><p>The windows are still open to the sound of the sea, somewhere further down the street someone is playing their radio, voices and laughter nearly lost on the wind. Joe basks in the peacefulness of it. Only when he finishes up and latches the creaking window shut does he realize he can’t hear the shower running. The house is too quiet. Has been too quiet for too long.
</p><p>He frowns and tosses the kitchen towel onto the edge of the sink. The light is on in the bathroom, the door cracked and a sliver of incandescent yellow spilling out onto the hallway’s smooth, hydraulic-tile floor. Joe gently raps on the door with one knuckle. "Nicky?"
</p><p>No answer. 
</p><p>It sets him on edge. He pushes it open without another warning.
</p><p>Nicky is sitting on the floor in nothing but a towel, one leg is splayed out, the other drawn up against his chest. His hair is still dripping from his shower and he has a soggy, bloody washcloth stuffed under his nose. He looks dazed, glassy-eyed.
</p><p>"Oh, sweetheart," Joe utters. 
</p><p>"S’almost over," Nicky slurs without looking up. Blood is running in rivulets between his tense fingers, down his elbow, staining the towel. 
</p><p>Joe presses into the little bathroom and crouches down between Nicky’s legs. "Let me see," he urges and gently replaces Nicky’s hand with his own on the washcloth. The fabric is saturated, oozing where he has pressure on it. "Pain?"
</p><p>"Yes," Nicky murmurs distantly.
</p><p>Joe braces the side of Nicky’s head with his free hand. "You gonna faint on me if you stand up, gorgeous?"
</p><p>Nicky blinks owlishly, then shuts his eyes. He leans heavily into Joe’s touch. "…Maybe," he admits. "I don’t—I do not know—"
</p><p>"Okay," Joe says. "Okay. Let me get you a new washcloth, then painkillers, then bed. Sound good?"
</p><p>Nicky just nods wearily. He squeezes Joe’s wrist once and lets go. 
</p><p>They get him cleaned up and into the rear bedroom. Joe carries him most of the short way. Nicky wobbles on his feet and has to hold onto the edge of the dresser for balance while Joe helps him step into a pair of oversized joggers.
</p><p>"I’m gonna kill Book," Joe mutters. "Blow his brain stem out through his stupid, fucking mouth and see how he feels the next day—"
</p><p>"Joe," Nicky interrupts wearily. "Please."
</p><p>He gives Nicky a Valium for sleep and goes back to the bathroom.
</p><p>Joe doesn’t know the flash point of his own anger anymore, not since London. Everything that he knew, that he’d gotten comfortable with was upturned and tumbled into a disorganized pile of shit he’s too tired and still too fucking furious to sort out.
</p><p>He still has Nicky. He always has Nicky.
</p><p>Then he thinks of Kozak stitching up Andy’s wounds, thinks of the gun in Nicky’s mouth and how he still tasted like metal and gunpowder when Joe kissed him that night, even after Nicky’d furiously scrubbed his teeth until he spat pink and Joe had to coax him away from the bathroom. Then Joe thinks he’s going to be sick for a few seconds, clutching at the edge of the sink.
</p><p>"Joe?" Nicky calls from the bedroom.
</p><p>"One sec—" he calls back. His voice cracks.
</p><p>He runs cold water in the tub and throws the bloody linens in to soak overnight. Then he splashes cold water over his face and breathes hard through his nose until the anger and agitation subside enough to face his husband the way Nicky needs right now.
</p><p>Joe checks the locks and then cuts the lights in the rest of the house before he goes back to the bedroom.
</p><p>Nicky’s already curled up beneath the heavy quilt. He watches silently as Joe strips down to boxer-briefs and his undershirt, and then beckons Joe to bed with outstretched arms. He kisses Joe carefully on the corner of his mouth. "Can you get the lamp?"
</p><p>Joe does and the darkness doesn’t make any of this easier.
</p><p>Instead of settling in the way they usually do, Nicky wiggles and squirms around within Joe’s embrace until they’re lying face-to-face, just inches from one another. Nicky presses his fingertips against Joe’s lower lip, gently rubbing over the thin skin there. "I know you are still angry with Booker," Nicky whispers. "I am angry, too."
</p><p>"Are you?" Joe doesn’t mean for it to sound skeptical. It’s just that Nicky always holds everything so closely to his heart and they have no reference for a betrayal of this magnitude.
</p><p>"And sad. And worried for our brother," Nicky admits. "How much have we missed that things would get so far?"
</p><p>"I can’t talk about it. Not tonight," Joe mutters. "Probably not for another fucking decade."
</p><p>Nicky acquiesces but sighs like he’s unhappy about it. "Another time, then," he says, so Joe knows he won’t get away with putting it off forever.
</p><p>That’s fine. It’s fine. One crisis at a time.
</p><p>The Valium is doing its work, because Nicky’ heavy-lidded eyes are drooping when he kisses Joe and rolls over again. 
</p><p>Joe waits for him to get settled before he tugs the quilt up over them both. "Why’d you turn all the AC off earlier?"
</p><p>Nicky hums out a thoughtful, sleepy noise. "I remembered the feeling of the air, that night I asked you to marry me again," he says dreamily, his accent heavier with exhaustion. "I remembered the heat and the smell of the water. I thought that if I could feel those things again now, that the memory would come back to me."
</p><p>Joe gathers Nicky close against his body. "It did."
</p><p>"Yes," Nicky murmurs. "But you helped it."
</p><p>That’s not the comfort it’s meant to be. Joe doesn’t say anything and only pulls his arms tighter. He’s awake long into the night, fingers pressed to the pulse-point of Nicky’s wrist.

</p><p><br/>
</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
</p><p>They’re usually up with the sun—old, old, old habits—but Nicky’s been sleeping late recently.
</p><p>Joe lets him be and goes for what ends up being an arduous twelve mile run. His older selves—any one of them—would probably think he’d gone batshit crazy to waste his time and energy this way. His mind drifts as he floats on the endorphins, and he wonders, not for the first time, what his first self would think about him gleefully offering his ass up on the reg to his immortal Christian invader assassin-husband.
</p><p>He snorts out a laugh and startles an elderly woman passing on her morning walk to church. "Scusami!" he offers with a brief wave and a charming smile. He picks up coffee and breakfast on his way back in, half a pistachio croissant still stuffed in his mouth when he shoulders through the front door.
</p><p>"Breakfast!" he shouts to the house at large.
</p><p>A beat of silence, then, "<i>Downstairs</i>."
</p><p>Joe follows Nicky’s voice to their storage room, where Nicky is seated cross-legged on the tile floor amid a chaotic array of open trunks and boxes. 
</p><p>Joe leans against the doorframe and chews on the rest of his croissant. "…This all for Antiques Roadshow?" he says around his mouthful.
</p><p>"We would win," Nicky says decisively.
</p><p>"It’s not a competition, baby."
</p><p>Nicky casts him a dry look and makes a grabby hand for one of the coffees. He pops the plastic lid off and gives the latte an appraising sniff. He sips it and licks at his foam-mustache. "No fancy flavors today?"
</p><p>Joe laughs and settles himself onto an old wooden steamer trunk that groans beneath his weight. "They were too busy for anything complicated. Here, though—" he holds the heavy paper bag forward. "I already finished mine. Rest is yours."
</p><p>Nicky peers into it and he cracks a smile. "Mio eroe," he mutters and immediately goes for the vanilla-cream cornetto, just like Joe knew he would. If Nicky can give him shit for drowning while he did his laundry, he can give Nicky shit for dying of an infected cavity in the 17th century—
</p><p>"Do not even say it," Nicky says preemptively, licking powdered sugar off his thumb. "You think too loudly."
</p><p>"So…" Joe says instead, casting his gaze meaningfully about the messy room.
</p><p>"I am just seeing what we have," Nicky replies, and then seems to think better of himself. "And testing myself."
</p><p>"On?"
</p><p>"What I can remember."
</p><p>Joe sighs. "Just—don’t be too hard on yourself," he says. "Even I don’t know what half this stuff is anymore."
</p><p>Nicky casts him a flickering smile.
</p><p>"So let’s remember together, huh?" Joe offers. "Want help?"
</p><p>"Always."
</p><p>Joe settles himself on the floor so he and Nicky can sit with their folded knees pressed together. Joe finds things and holds them out for Nicky, and Nicky stares at them with the unsettling sort of intensity only he can wield. Old books, sketches, a cracked compass, a coil of rotted rope, a wind-up tin soldier, coins and rings and a Byzantine green-glaze plate… 
</p><p>Usually Nicky remembers. Sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes neither of them do. 
</p><p>They make a lighthearted game out of it, because doing that takes the sting out of the times when Nicky’s face goes blank as he looks at something, but Joe knows him well enough to see the thin, invisible cloud of distress pass over him.
</p><p>"Get two more and I’ll start dealing out IOUs for blowjobs," Joe says with one of his winks.
</p><p>That startles a laugh out of Nicky, startles him out of his own head. "Would you tell me no if asked nicely?"
</p><p>"Not the point."
</p><p>"And if we are on a stake out and I call in one of these favors?" Nicky asks. "What then?"
</p><p>"Guess you’ll have to find out," Joe says airily. He’s entirely sure Nicky would still land a perfect kill-shot with his dick in Joe’s mouth. He doesn’t say it aloud, though, because he knows Nicky doesn’t back down from challenges.
</p><p>They get through another two boxes before Joe finds a worn, brown cloth pouch, slips it open, and freezes. He stares at the knife in his hand—a simple blade with a cruciform guard and wheel pommel wrapped in half-disintegrated leather. "I didn’t know you kept this," Joe says. He glances up to see Nicky already watching him.
</p><p>"It is a good knife," Nicky replies flatly. "It would have been a waste not to."
</p><p>They had been on the road to Cairo. It was the closest major city and they could only hope the women in their dreams would see them the same way, and they would find each other. It was all they knew to do. That was nearly the only thing Yusuf and Nicolò had agreed upon, locked in their frigid truce, as they trekked back through the horrors laid upon the Holy Land. 
</p><p>They had stopped murdering each other, at least.
</p><p>Mostly.
</p><p>"…Where did you learn this?"
</p><p>The Latin was watching Yusuf’s hands, his strange, pale eyes affixed to the movement of them. It was unsettling. Nearly everything about the man was unsettling, not least of which their shared immunity to death. His prolonged periods of silence, the starkness of his gaze—always shadowed, always exhausted—the way he communicated in half-glances and clipped sentences. 
</p><p>Yusuf was crouched over the fire pit he’d built, coaxing up the flame. "My father," he replied shortly. "He was a merchant, and I traveled with him. We had wealth, but long ago his family had been goat herders and he did not let us forget that. He taught me that there is no skill that was beneath us." He snapped a handful of dry twigs and fed them into the flame one by one.
</p><p>"He—you cared for him, then?"
</p><p>Yusuf stared at Nicolò as if he was mad for asking such a thing. "Of course I did. I loved my family more than anything," he said. "Every <i>day</i> my heart aches with the loss of them. I would give up a thousand of these lives to spend one last hour with them."
</p><p>"…I did not have a family," Nicolò said after a time. "My great-uncle was a priest at the <i>Santo Stefano</i>. I was sent to him as a young child, sent to the monastery, and he died soon after. The monks there taught me to read and write, and for this I looked after the animals. I ate what the animals ate and slept where the animals slept. And then I became one of the priests because I knew nothing else of the world."
</p><p>"Were they kind to you there? When you were a child?"
</p><p>The Latin looked troubled, as if parsing the question out in his mind. "I would not have known the difference, before—but now," he said, almost haltingly, "No. I do not think they were."
</p><p>"I’m sorry."
</p><p>"Why?"
</p><p>"Children are blameless," Yusuf said bluntly. "There’s little greater cruelty than the one inflicted on an innocent."
</p><p>"And of Jerusalem, then?" Nicolò asked softly, gaze trained on the logs. "Of the path to that place, and the innocents who were killed for it?"
</p><p>Nicolò hadn’t been on the long march to Jerusalem. He’d arrived by boat with the rest of the Genoese, bringing with them a fresh resurgence of men, supplies, and a fervor stoked into bloodthirsty zealotry by the words of Nicolò and men like him. 
</p><p>"Look at me when you ask that question, Nicolò. Look me in the eye," Yusuf said harshly. "Don’t you dare even <i>think</i> of that place without looking me in the eye when you do it."
</p><p>For once, Nicolò obeyed him.
</p><p>Yusuf’s eyes were hard, glittering dark-bright across the fire. "Malevolence beyond comprehension," he said, low and even. "A corruption, a perversion of nature become manifest. There is no Christian who could look upon what was done in these places with clear eyes, and say that it was done rightly and in the name of God."
</p><p>It was still the early days, when he mistook Nicolò’s silence for indifference. It was too much that night. Yusuf’s grief was a barbed and vicious thing, its wicked hooks sunken inside his ribcage—but seeing the blankness of Nicolò’s face, the drawn and defensive tightness of his frame in that moment, he finally let it flash outside of himself.
</p><p>"Every person I have ever called family is dead, and now I am here like this with you. If you wanted to send me to Hell, Nicolò, you have done it," Yusuf said bitterly. "May you sleep easily tonight for knowing it."
</p><p>Yusuf had said nothing else, just scooted down in his bedroll and turned his back to the fire, and to Nicolò. 
</p><p>They traveled for another three weeks in tense, near-constant silence before it all broke open between them. 
</p><p>They had been lucky to find a single room in some no-name village that was more sheep than people. It was still the dead of night, and Yusuf awoke to find Nicolò’s bedroll on the floor was empty. His broadsword lay where he’d left it next to his pack—the sight of it all sent a frisson of unease down Yusuf’s spine.
</p><p>He shrugged into his cloak. After a moment of thought, he left his own sword, instead slipping into his sash the leather-wrapped knife he knew Nicolò kept in his pack. 
</p><p>Out in the lamp-lit main room, the building’s owner—more wiry white hair and wrinkles than anything—was curled contemplatively over a steaming glass of tea. He almost looked asleep in his easy lean against the cool, stucco wall.
</p><p>"Where did my traveling companion go?" Yusuf asked.
</p><p>The old man stirred and squinted at him. "Who?"
</p><p>Yusuf sighed. "The strange white man with the—" he waved a hand in front of his own face, "—nose."
</p><p>"Oh," the owner grunted. He gestured with a tip of his chin. "Out the back. He looked like he was going to be ill."
</p><p>"That's him," Yusuf muttered and shouldered his way out the door.
</p><p>It was silent outside beyond the dry rustling of palms in the wind. Yusuf stood still, listening. Only then able to follow the faint, repetitive noise out past the overgrowth and half-crumbled stone wall behind the house, picking his way carefully beneath the moon’s watery half-light.
</p><p>Yusuf would never forget, not in a thousand years, coming upon the sight of Nicolò’s naked, bloodied back. Much of it was already dried ruddy brown and flaking off, the wounds closing over even as he whipped himself with a crude leather scourge to inflict fresh ones. All the while he rocked on his knees, murmuring to himself in feverish Latin.
</p><p>"Stop!" Yusuf cried, horrified. He lunged forward and snatched the foul thing right out of Nicolò’s hand, hard enough to tumble the man off balance and into the dirt.
</p><p>"What is this?" Yusuf demanded, crouching down as he brandished the scourge between them. "<i>What have you done?</i>"
</p><p>Nicolò stared up at him in shock, bloodshot, grief-swollen eyes eerie and luminous. His jaw worked once, soundless, then again. "It is—it is the cleansing of sin," he stammered out. "<i>Blows that wound cleanse away</i>—" he swallowed, "—<i>evil</i>."
</p><p>Yusuf pulled a face of disgust and flung the scourge off into the brush. 
</p><p>The moment he did so Nicolò lunged forward, viper-quick, and seized his own knife right from the fold of Yusuf’s thick sash. His hands were shaking so hard he nearly dropped the weapon before he pressed it to his own neck. 
</p><p>"Please—" the Latin choked out in his anguish. He clutched at Yusuf, one set of bony fingers tight around Yusuf’s wrist, the other drawing fresh blood where they held the blade against his own throat. "<i>Please</i>," he repeated, this time in Arabic, as if there were any mistaking what he asked for. He placed Yusuf’s hand against the knife at his neck.
</p><p>It was the first time Yusuf felt no compulsion to use it. "Fool man," he uttered. He felt no anger in that moment—none of the simmering resentment that had fueled him through his first death. He felt exhaustion, he felt <i>pity</i>.
</p><p>"I won’t do it," Yusuf said and tried to pull his hand back. 
</p><p>Nicolò’s expression darkened with anger. "Why not—?!" he demanded, then shoved Yusuf hard, goading him. He surged to his knees and slammed Yusuf back against the rough wall, pinning him there with one strong arm, the other poised with the blade beneath Yusuf’s chin now. "Why not, <i>saraceno?!</i>" he hissed through his teeth.
</p><p>Yusuf saw the provocation for what it was now. He refused to rise to it, to feed into the man’s reckless, self-excoriating spiral. "I will not hurt you anymore," he said calmly, gazing at Nicolò’s furious face inches away from his own, breath hot against his cheek. "I do not know what this life is, but I refuse to spend another moment of it inflicting needless pain." He didn’t flinch when he felt blood well up beneath his chin, dribbling down to soak the collar of his tunic. "I was not a cruel man in my first life, Nicolò, and my greatest fear now is that I am becoming one."
</p><p>It all seemed to take Nicolò off guard. He stared at Yusuf with a strange and wide-eyed look. Between one moment and the next, something within the foundations of him seemed to crack. "I—I do not know how to get it—<i>out</i> of me," he stammered, his expression becoming stricken. "These—this feeling. I could tear myself open and cut it out and it would only grow back—"
</p><p>"For fuck’s sake, priest, let go of me and we can speak to one another like reasonable people," Yusuf said.
</p><p>Nicolò hovered for a moment, indecisive, and then relented and let Yusuf up.
</p><p>"The feeling of what?" Yusuf asked, then, though he felt oddly devoid of malice. It just sounded curious and a little tired. "The march on Jerusalem? Seeing the reality of what has been done in God’s name?"
</p><p>"All of it. <i>All of it</i>," Nicolò said as his voice took on a desperate edge. "And every day, seeing the face of a man I was taught to hate and knowing now there were never such things in him to deserve it."
</p><p>"I killed many Christians before you, Nicolò," Yusuf said dryly. "And I stabbed you in your sleep. Twice."
</p><p>"Would you have traveled to Genoa, come to my abbey to cut me down upon my own doorstep?" Nicolò asked bitterly. "Slaughtered my neighbors and—and set fire to my home, and praised it all in the name of Allah?"
</p><p>Yusuf groaned and scrubbed at his face. "This world is taxing enough without adding your hypotheticals to it. If I tell you yes, will you let me get a full night of rest?"
</p><p>Nicolò blinked at him.
</p><p>"I’m tired, Nicolò," Yusuf confessed. "I’m so <i>tired</i>. We can’t go on like this." He slumped down onto the ground next to the Latin. "If telling me I’m not worthy of your hate is your way of admitting you are as well, I am willing to meet you in that," said Yusuf. "Or have you forgotten the feeling of having someone who will protect your back, instead of stabbing it? If not a friend, at least a—an <i>ally</i>."
</p><p>Nicolò looked away, lips thinning. He had a strange, shuttered expression and he said nothing.
</p><p>"Fine," Yusuf muttered. He scuffed his boot into the rocky dirt and shifted to get to his feet, content to let the Latin wallow in dust and misery as long as he liked.
</p><p>"Wait—" Nicolò cried out, dropping the knife to grab Yusuf’s arm instead. "I don’t—just—"
</p><p>"Just what, Nicolò?" Yusuf asked, exasperated. "<i>What?</i>"
</p><p>"Sit with me."
</p><p>Yusuf stared. "Sit with you," he repeated.
</p><p>"Please," Nicolò added. He squeezed Yusuf’s arm. "I will—I am trying to meet you in this. Please."
</p><p>He had never spoken that word to Yusuf before this night, and then to have said it so many times—a beat passed before Yusuf acquiesced and sat down again. "Do <i>not</i> stab me," he muttered.
</p><p>"I will not," Nicolò replied as he jerked his tunic back over his head. His back was still crusted with blood, but the skin was smooth and healed beneath. He hovered for a moment, unsure of himself, and then finally, stiffly, settled himself at Yusuf’s side. Not close enough to touch, but close enough that Yusuf could feel the heat of his body.
</p><p>Yusuf waited, but Nicolò did nothing else. He just sat.
</p><p>It seemed, though, that the longer they sat together this way, unspeaking, unmoving, the more the tension drained out from Nicolò’s body. His shoulders dropped, and then his head, and then he drew his long legs up and wrapped his arms around them loosely.
</p><p>Yusuf and Nicolò had never existed this way before, so close to one another with only calm and quiet between them. Yusuf had the strange realization that they were relearning what it meant to be in each other’s presence. He didn’t mind the stillness so much then.
</p><p>They sat that way until the sun came up.
</p><p>"I am sorry," Nicolò whispered, breaking the silence at last. The emotional furor had long gone out of him. Without it, his gaze dropped and his words grew halting again. "I can’t—I can’t undo any of it, but I am sorry for it."
</p><p>"That kind of penance…" Yusuf nodded off towards the direction he’d thrown the scourge. "Did they teach you that at your abbey?"
</p><p>"It is what was done," Nicolò said quietly. "Not all of them. Some. But it was taught to me when I was—" he glanced away, cheeks reddening, "young."
</p><p>"It’s barbarism," Yusuf replied. "You only suffer because of men who taught you that is what you must do. There is nothing of God in punishing yourself this way, and no reason to fear Hell if you are already living it like that anyway. Do you understand?"
</p><p>"I don’t understand anything," Nicolò admitted softly. "I only know that I am frightened. Always. Of what I have become, and of—and of what I was before." He worked at the fraying cuff of his sleeve, fingers thin and agitated in their movements. "I don’t know where God is any more, and I do not know how to make things right when all I’ve known is wrong."
</p><p>Yusuf sighed through his nose, watching the nervous movement of Nicolò’s hands. "I can’t carry the weight of your guilt, but… I will try to look at you and see no face but your own. No actions that are not your own. It will be a place to start."
</p><p>He could feel Nicolò’s gaze on him, the intensity of it. "If you—if you put your trust in me, I will keep it safe," Nicolò said, body gone very still now. "For as long as you think I am fit to have it."
</p><p>"Fair," Yusuf said, as though they were haggling over vegetables at the market.
</p><p>"Yusuf," Nicolò murmured, brow creasing down. 
</p><p>"What?"
</p><p>"I have called you nothing but <i>saraceno</i>. I am trying out the sound of it," Nicolò said. "Yusuf. Yusuf."
</p><p>His accent gave the syllables an airier, rolling cadence, though even the harshest language became softened and supple in his mouth. It was pleasing to hear. Yusuf would admit that now. "<i>Nicolò</i>," he repeated back, exaggerating the sharp consonants of it.
</p><p>"That is not my name."
</p><p>"No?" Yusuf arched an eyebrow at him. "What is it, then?"
</p><p>The corner of Nicolò’s mouth twitched. "<i>Fool Man</i>."
</p><p>Yusuf snorted. "I will save that one for special occasions," he said, but couldn’t help the way the lines of his face eased. Of all times for the man to show he possessed a sense of humor. "Something else."
</p><p>"Very well." Nicolò hummed out a thoughtful noise. "When I was a child I was Nico," he said. "I have not been Nico in a very long time."
</p><p>"Nico, then." Yusuf picked up Nico’s knife and turned it in his hand. He sighed and scrubbed some of the dried blood from it with the edge of his tunic. "No more of this," he said. "Find penance in a way that will not wake or keep me up at night." He cast Nico a hard, sidelong look. "Or yourself."
</p><p>Three days later Nico found the start of that penance, buried deep in the gut of the horse-thief who was poised to slit Yusuf’s throat. The man at his feet twitched and groaned and Nico plunged the knife down once more with grisly finality. "<i>You stay that way</i>," he muttered under his breath in Ligurian and jerked the blade free in a thick arterial splatter. "<i>I want to keep my company as it is</i>."
</p><p>Then Nico rose from his defensive crouch, wiped his hand clean, and offered it forward. "Yusuf—" he panted, another man’s blood in his teeth and his eyes wild-bright in the moonlight, "You are unhurt?"
</p><p>Yusuf accepted Nico’s hand and knew with a soul-deep clarity, then, that his trust was safe.

</p><p><br/>
</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
</p><p>Nicky doggedly makes it through another day of cleaning and sorting and another dozen boxes before the dust gives him a crippling migraine. Joe’s never been one for subtlety and he hovers over his husband with an agitated, hand-wringing sort of worry. 
</p><p>Their occupation gets them access to a questionable sweep of industrial-strength painkillers, though, so Nicky is mostly too doped up to get annoyed by it. He stays curled up in their darkened bedroom most of the day, sleeping when he’s not accepting water and pills and soup and blankets from Joe without complaint.
</p><p>"I’ve got something else for you."
</p><p>Nicky looks up from his laptop and the goofy baking competition show he loves so much. He has the screen’s brightness dimmed to its lowest setting, watching it curled up on his side in a giant lump of old feather pillows. He’s in a full set of pajamas and one of Joe’s wash-worn workout hoodies this time. "Is that so?"
</p><p>"A good memory," Joe says coyly. He crawls up onto the bed with a colorful cello-wrapped packet in-hand. "A sweeter one. Open up."
</p><p>Nicky gives him a dry look.
</p><p>"Later," Joe says with a snicker. "Humor me now."
</p><p>So Nicky does, sitting up and settling back onto the pillow-mountain. He closes his eyes and lets his mouth drop open, patient while Joe places one sugary square onto his tongue. "<i>Marzapane</i>," Nico immediately murmurs, brow ticking down. He lets the sweet dissolve in his mouth. "With rosewater."
</p><p>"Almost as good as Andy at that," Joe says and offers forward a second piece. "Again. What does it taste like?"
</p><p>Nicky drops his head back and stares at the ceiling for a minute while he thinks and chews. Then clarity breaks across his face. A smile curls over his full lips, the flush already rising high on his cheeks. "<i>Sarzana</i>."
</p><p>"Sarzana," Joe repeats with a slow grin.
</p><p>Nicky nudges him in the ribs. "Which part of Sarzana? We did many, <i>many</i> things there."
</p><p>"The first night. The first night I tasted these—" Joe sets the packet of sweets aside, "—and tasted other things." He leans over to kiss Nicky.
</p><p>Ottavio hadn’t been a Medici. He was close enough, though, that he warranted an armed escort through the peninsula on a tour of his family’s vast wine-producing properties. It was easy money and Yusuf had been growing weary of subsisting on bread and goat’s milk. And so for weeks, Yusuf and Nico saw the aristocrat safely from doorstep to doorstep, cutting a dozen men down on the way who would have gutted and robbed them on the road. From Florence all the way to Naples, and finally back up to his family’s sprawling villa in Sarzana. As soon as they arrived, Ottavio had sized the two of them up, gaze heavy and knowing, and invited them to stay as part of his thanks.
</p><p>Yusuf and Nico were long friends by that point, and Yusuf had accepted for both of them, the brilliant pleasure of Ottavio’s smile eclipsing Nico’s telling silence.
</p><p>They were given their own room, access to villa’s private baths, new sets of rich court-clothing. Far finer than what had existed in the markets and traders’ warehouses of Yusuf’s youth. Fresh water and herbs and linens to clean themselves, scented oils for their hair and skin—they’d seemed like such extravagant luxuries to Yusuf, after so many decades of dust and travel.
</p><p>"Will I finally see you without that scraggly beard, Nico?" Yusuf teased, nudging his companion in the side. It wasn’t that Nico thought so little of himself that he took no care in his appearance or wellbeing, it was just that he seemed to give no thought to himself at all. Beard perennially overgrown, hair unbrushed and untrimmed, perpetually hovering on the edge of underfed beneath his layers of drab, scratchy tunics. Any ounce he had to spare—of money, or food, or kindness, or comfort, or warmth—he gave away to anyone he deemed needier of them than himself. 
</p><p>Which was nearly everyone. And Yusuf.
</p><p>He kept himself hygienic, at least, but that might have been an act of benevolence for Yusuf after some gentle, and then not so gentle, prodding.
</p><p>"This is too much," Nico murmured. His eyes looked enormous, sunken and shadowed as he surveyed the grand room around them, the austerity of its stone walls tempered in rich, heavy rugs and vibrant tapestries. "It is too much…"
</p><p>"You think I don’t deserve this?" Yusuf asked with an arched brow. He swept his arm forward in a grand gesture around them. "After nearly three centuries in the service of others’ wellbeing, of dedicating whatever this life is to others, that I don’t deserve to accept a friend’s generosity freely given to me?"
</p><p>"<i>No</i>, Yusuf," Nico said, appalled, "You are deserving. Of course you are deserving. I meant—I meant that for me—"
</p><p>"<i>Exactly</i>," Yusuf crowed, jabbing a finger into the center of Nico’s chest. "You have been at my side for every moment. Why should you grant yourself any less for it than you would me?"
</p><p>Nico stared at him, wide-eyed as his jaw worked once, twice. "We are—we are different."
</p><p>"We aren’t. Not in the ways that matter," Yusuf countered. "We haven’t been in a very long time. " Then Yusuf sighed, softened. He lighted a hand on Nico’s bony shoulder and squeezed it, ducking to catch the man’s downturned gaze. "When will you realize that allowing yourself comfort and pleasure does not deprive it from someone else?" He slid his palm to rest heavy over Nico’s heart. "You have grown into my dearest friend. Every day I see the good that you put into the world, and it humbles me that I can share in that with you, at your side."
</p><p>Nico’s brows twitched down, almost as though he were confused. "You are the best man I have ever known," he said flatly—not a platitude, but as if merely stating some mundane fact. <i>The milk has gone sour. There is rain coming tomorrow. In three centuries wandering the earth, Yusuf Al-Kaysani is the best man I have ever known upon it.</i>
</p><p>Yusuf gave into his urge in that moment and cupped his hands around Nico’s scruffy jaw, gently bumping their foreheads together. "Nicolò," he said, "you know that the moment you can show yourself the same kindness you show others, I am here." 
</p><p>It was the closest he’d ever gotten to admitting that heavy, unspoken thing growing between them for nearly a century now.
</p><p>Nico had given him a strange look, as if on the precipice of saying something but the words were caught and jumbled in his throat. He flushed and looked down, breaking their gaze as he stepped back; though he reached up to squeeze Yusuf’s wrists in a sort of tactile reassurance before he pushed them away. "I will think on it."
</p><p>"That is all I could ask," Yusuf replied.
</p><p>Yusuf had availed himself of all their new luxuries while Nico had disappeared to find the little chapel. The villa had afforded Yusuf new sets clothing in rich burgundies, blacks, and hues of saturated copper, velvets and silk jacquard. He neatened his beard and tamed his curls and felt, for the first time in recent memory, a measure of satisfaction—even pride—in his own appearance.
</p><p>A small enclave of painters and artists had taken up residence at the villa under the patronage of the family. Yusuf went to observe their work for a time, and then took his evening meal with them—an extravagant affair filled with rich foods and wines and dessert tables laden with marzapane sweets and fruit custard tarts.
</p><p>Yusuf was feeling sulkish that Nico had missed it. The man was a secret fiend for sweets, as much as he was mortified to admit so. Taking his time walking back to their quarters, Yusuf mused that perhaps, in the meantime, Nico would have at least worked himself out of his doldrum.
</p><p>Nico had, and he was waiting for Yusuf.
</p><p>The heavy, arched doors to the veranda had been thrown wide to let in the evening breeze, the wrought-metal lanterns already lighted for the night. The Byzantine Empire had fallen, but there, framed in golden-hour sunlight, Nicolò di Genova looked like the last vestige of it. 
</p><p>Almost four-hundred years together and Yusuf felt like he was seeing Nico for the first time all over again. But there was no filthy battlefield or hatred between them here—only the evening sounds of crickets, the yellow-flickering glow of the lamps, and a wellspring of things gone unsaid for far too long.
</p><p>Clean shaven, hair trimmed up his shoulders now, soft and brushed back from his hollowed face. Nico was jarringly beautiful, his features striking in their severity and contrast, as though every line of his form was sharper, every shadow and color deeper. Dressed in shades of cobalt and copper-patina, his Nico had become one of those saturnine-eyed saints from Byzantium’s holy mosaics—and Yusuf was ready to sink to his knees and worship.
</p><p>To worship him, to paint him, to finally touch him. Just touch him. Yusuf wanted to press his fingers to the mole on his jaw, ask how Nico could look so young like this, and so suddenly. "You—" he swallowed, unable to look away. "You thought upon things."
</p><p>Unsure how to interpret Yusuf’s heavy regard, Nico looked down at himself. He fidgeted with a wide silver ring on his index finger, then smoothed his hands along the front of the fitted, high-collared <i>pellanda</i>. "Yes, I—I asked for Ottavio’s help with—this," he faltered for a moment, then added, "With me." 
</p><p>Yusuf’s expression eased. "I am glad, Nic—"
</p><p>"Yusuf," Nico looked up at him again, "Do you want me?"
</p><p>Yusuf’s mouth dried up. He imagined, then, why Nico rarely looked at people so directly—to be pinned beneath the full force of his pale, unwavering gaze—it froze the air in Yusuf’s lungs. "I—what?" he croaked.
</p><p>"I have thought you—that you might, sometimes," Nico explained. "And I had convinced myself that I was mistaken. Or that you could not love me in that way. But I—"
</p><p>"Yes." 
</p><p>Nico’s voice cut off mid-sentence. "…Yes?"
</p><p>"I want you," Yusuf said, firmer now. "My love for you has been greater than that of a friend for many years now."
</p><p>Nico’s eyes widened for a second, then he swallowed so hard his throat clicked. "Then you must listen to me."
</p><p>Yusuf reached forward in a placating sort of gesture, handing hovering in the air between them. "Nico," he said, "You do not need to explain yourself—"
</p><p>"I do," Nico interrupted quickly. "And if I don’t now, I might—I might never have the courage to tell you again."
</p><p>"Tell me anything. You may always tell me anything."
</p><p>"I don’t know how to—how to do any of this with you, Yusuf," Nico began, gaze fixed somewhere on Yusuf's chest, "But I want to try. I want it. In my old life, the way I was then—I thought my love and purpose in God were the same, and I slaughtered innocent people in the name of that," he said in a quick tumble of words. "As long as I might live, I will carry the responsibility of that—"
</p><p>"Nico—"
</p><p>"Hush," Nico chided him gently. "Just, let me—let me say this. You have shown more grace than any man of God I knew before. You are the kindest man I have ever known and the bravest. Your wisdom humbles me so deeply that—that some days I do not know how I get up again," Nico said. He stepped in to close the distance between them, his long robe a whisper on the floor at his feet. "You have offered me salvation from myself and you did not even know it. And I want to—I want to honor what you have given me. My love is for you and my purpose is with you, and—and whatever this life is, it will be a blessed one as long as I am by your side."
</p><p>Nico reached out, curling his fingers into the cloth of Yusuf’s heavy tunic. "I love you. I am <i>in</i> love with you," he said, quiet but with the conviction of centuries behind it. "I will never forget that you are my greatest gift, and that you found the <i>goodness</i> of me."
</p><p>Nico finally looked up and was met with the brightness of tears in Yusuf’s deep eyes.
</p><p>"Nico. <i>Nicolò</i>—" Yusuf’s voice broke on the name. He closed his hands around Nico’s wrists, pinning them close against his chest. "Let me finally kiss you, my heart," he implored. "Don’t make me beg for it, I’ll—"
</p><p>Nico leaned up and swallowed down the rest of his words. Clumsy, unpracticed, sweet and earnest. Their noses collided and their teeth clicked, but then Yusuf tilted his head to the side and they found the way they matched. Nico tasted like the mint leaves he’d been chewing. His hands were shaking.
</p><p>Yusuf only drew away when his lungs ached. Eyes closed, he rested his forehead against Nico’s as they caught their breath and shared the air between them. "My heart," he murmured, pushing his fingers up through Nicos’ hair to cradle his face. "<i>Ya amar</i>."
</p><p>There was no goodness or beauty in the world which could compare to Nico’s smile in that moment, broad and heartfelt and rare. "Yours for as long as you will have it, my love."
</p><p>"I wish I had painted you then," Joe says, almost dreamily, "the first moment I saw you like that at the villa, dressed like you should have been one of those noblemen all along."
</p><p>"I wasn’t so bad before that, was I?"
</p><p>"Baby, you gave me <i>lice</i>," says Joe. He plucks at the frayed strings of Nicky’s hoodie. "More than once."
</p><p>Nicky snickers and squashes himself deeper into the pillows. "I am thinking of growing my hair out again. Like it was then."
</p><p>"Yeah?" Joe glances sideways at him, tries not to let it show how much that thought thrills him. "It’ll look good."
</p><p>"…You could have been one of them, those painters," Nicky murmurs after a moment of quiet thought. "Become one of the Old Masters. Even then, you were as good as the best among them."
</p><p>"I know," Joe acknowledges quietly.
</p><p>"Sometimes I wish you had," Nicky admits. "That we had stayed in Sarzana. I wish that the world could see the extraordinary beauty you put into it and revere your name for it, more than just the good you do where it cannot see." He rubs idly at his chest and turns a faint smile on Joe. "I will have to continue to do it for the world, I think."
</p><p>"My husband is an incurable romantic," Joe says, heart aching with affection.
</p><p>"I am." Nicky holds out his arms. "Come. You are too far away from me," he says primly. "I have nearly forgotten what my beloved husband looks like at all, for the distance between us."
</p><p>Joe snort-laughs and half scoots, half rolls to close those few inches. He lets himself be gathered against Nicky’s warm chest, the weight of Nicky’s head resting against his. "We haven’t visited our portrait in a while," he says idly.
</p><p>They’d had it done at Ottavio’s insistence—staid, stylized, standing side by side on the villa’s sunlit south veranda. They had largely forgotten about it until the painting was discovered in a Nazi bunker after the end of the second war, and subsequently set the academic and art world ablaze once the title on the back was authenticated:
</p><p><i>Gli Innamorati a Sarzana</i>
</p><p>"You want to?" Nicky asks.
</p><p>"Nah," Joe finally says, rubbing at Nicky’s arm around him. "Louvre’s too crowded this time of year."
</p><p>"And it is Paris," Nicky adds softly.
</p><p>Joe sighs. "And it’s Paris."

</p><p><br/>
</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
</p><p>Joe rises long before the sun the next morning. Nicky is still lost to the world, covers half thrown off and arm dangling off the side of the bed. He’s drooling on the pillow a bit.
</p><p>He slips downstairs into the little storage room, tidy and dusted now, and thinks, <i>better six hundred years too late than never</i>. The oil paints are new—Joe doesn’t know how many times his body fended off heavy metals poisoning before it was a known thing, back when he used to hand-grind his pigments in a mortar and pestle. The smooth palette board and sable brushes are the same ones he’s used, cleaned, restored, and tenderly maintained since Sarzana, though, all carefully rolled in a leather pouch.
</p><p>Joe hauls it all outside to the larger of their balconies, the one off the main floor, and flips on the single, yellow-hued porch light. He sets up his easel, stool, and canvas on an angle so he can see the long cut of the black-glittering sea. Most people wouldn’t think that the best setup, necessarily, but he doesn’t mind—sunlight, lamplight, candlelight, moonlight—even if his colors shift on his canvas as the sun rises, they’ll all be truthful.
</p><p><i>Nicky is the moon and he is clothed in the ocean.</i>
</p><p>That’s all Joe has in his head to start with and he paints for hours.
</p><p>Joe paints the Nicky he remembers during the Renaissance, but the style speaks more like Impressionism than anything—the colors and textures and intangible <i>feel</i> of the man blurred through time—abyssal indigos and sea-washed greens, ripples of cream and ivory, the softness and gentility of his lover’s form interrupted by pinprick-small but deadly, white-hot solar flares in the placid evening sky.
</p><p>The style suits Nicky best, Joe thinks, because capturing his love with anything less than a billion empyrean motes of color and light is reductive, limiting.
</p><p>Joe had tried his hand at abstraction and experimental. That foray just ended up in a dry white canvas with <i>I love this man. I love this man. I love this man. I will never convince you how much I love this man</i>. slapped across it in a fury of red ink. Booker’d hauled the thing off to Paris and sold it for twelve thousand euros.
</p><p>Joe had found the whole experience fundamentally underwhelming. He knows he’s a sap and so are his stylistic preferences, apparently.
</p><p>The sun rises and eventually so does Nicky, the noises of the morning coming to life behind Joe in the house. Opening squeaky casement windows, grinding coffee, knocking old plumbing. Nicky has a beautiful, resonant singing voice, but he’s shy about it, so he usually just hums—this morning it’s some upbeat, poppy song from the Euro top 40. 
</p><p>He isn’t sure the rest of the family has ever heard Nicky truly sing. Some parts of Nicky are still poetry that only Joe can read. 
</p><p>The balcony doors creak open.
</p><p>"I’m gonna call it <i>Nicky</i>," Joe says over his shoulder. He smudges a streak of navy along the shoreline of Nicky’s waist.
</p><p>His husband’s laughter is sweet and soft as he examines the wet canvas, hovering at Joe’s back. "Will you never tire of that subject?"
</p><p>"Never," Joe says. "As long as I live." He twists around on his stool and tilts his head up to look at Nicky. He frowns. "The subject looks tired, though."
</p><p>Nicky passes Joe a fresh cup of coffee—black, foamy, syrupy thick, the steam heavy with cardamom and clove. He hooks his chin over Joe’s shoulder, stooping down a little, letting their heads rest together. "The subject has been told that he always looks tired."
</p><p>"You slept okay?"
</p><p>Nicky hums, the sound of it a rumble against Joe’s back as he gazes at the painting of himself. "I had very pleasant dreams," Nicky says, then, "Give me an eclipse."
</p><p>Joe’s fingers twitch towards his yellows. "Why?"
</p><p>"Because the moon has no light, no shape to be seen without its sun," Nicky says easily, almost airily. "It has only endless movement without life, in the blackness, without purpose. Do not leave your moon so alone as that."
</p><p>"Ay, caro, your heart bleeds even for some paint on a canvas," Joe says, smitten. "Fine. But the moon should rest his mind to know the sun would give him anything he wants."
</p><p>Nicky laughs silently into Joe’s hair, breath ruffling through his tight curls. "I love you, sole mio," he murmurs into Joe’s ear. He kisses the spot just behind it and leaves Joe to his work, padding back towards the kitchen to start breakfast.

</p><p><br/>
</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
</p><p>Joe takes the train into Genoa later that day. He asks Nicky if he wants anything, but doesn’t ask if he wants to come along. It takes Nicky a while to warm back up to crowds of people and the noise and press of city streets—when they’re not on a job, at least. 
</p><p>Joe goes to the Chiesa di Santo Stefano and lights a candle first. 
</p><p>He’s not sure why he does this; he isn’t sure if Nicky even knows he does it every time they pass through Genoa. Joe hasn't believed in anything except his family for a long time, but it still seems right. The building isn't the original abbey, but it’s still the place where Nico grew up. 
</p><p>Joe sits for a time in the austere silence, in the heavy air, amid the slumberous, time-soaked stones, and remembers the blazing ferocity of the man who ushered him into this life and hasn’t left his side since. He tries to imagine Nicky in this place—a little boy shivering in a barn somewhere close by, who grew up lost then died then lived again and again and again, become a soft-spoken wellspring of the hope and kindness he’d never known in his first life, gifted upon the world. 
</p><p>Joe’s heart aches for the wondrous, improbable paradox of his lover. 
</p><p>Then he gets gelato.
</p><p>The girls at the <i>Vecchio Mondo</i>’s bakery counter see Joe’s backward baseball cap, think he’s a tourist, and compliment his Italian. He just grins and thanks them and, after a moment of thought, asks if they do custom orders. 
</p><p>"Per la tua ragazza?" one asks.
</p><p>"Per l’amore assoluto della mia vita," Joe replies with a wink. "Mio marito."
</p><p>She loves that even more and goes to get her grandmother from the back kitchen. The woman who comes out with her barely scrapes five feet tall, with a great meringue-mound of white hair piled high on her head. Her hands are gnarled with arthritis and perfectly manicured.
</p><p>Joe is immensely charmed. He explains to her what he wants.
</p><p>"Bene, bene," she says. "Torna tra quattro ore." She clacks her red-lacquered nails against the countertop and waves Joe away to signal she’s done with him for now.
</p><p>Some art supply shops, used bookstores, an antique store that would probably murder to get their hands on some of the stuff in Joe and Nicky’s storage room, Joe wanders without much purpose or direction. He texts Nicky not to wait up for dinner tonight. Then he texts him a selfie from the Piazza de Ferrari and gets a string of kissy-face and heart emojis in reply. <i>che bello!!!!!</i>
</p><p>It’s past nine by the time Joe makes it back to their little stretch of cobbled street near Camogli. He slips past the gated twelve-foot stone wall surrounding their property, then through the second wrought-iron fence around their house. The porch light is on for him.
</p><p>Joe checks the locks, showers, and then comes to bed with the white cardboard bakery box in his hand.
</p><p>Nicky glances up from his book, peering at the box the way a librarian peers over their reading glasses. "Are we preparing to hibernate for winter?"
</p><p>"Not a bad idea," Joe says. The thought of curling up in bed with Nicky and sleeping off a few months is deeply appealing. "We’re playing our game again."
</p><p>"Oh?" Nicky’s expression turns amused. He slips a bookmark into his page and carefully sets the worn paperback aside. Eco’s <i>Il Nome della Rosa</i>. He keeps a copy in every house. "How do you know I am not pretending by now?"
</p><p>"I don’t think I would mind either way," Joe replies. He carefully settles himself between Nicky’s knees and slips the box’s lid open.
</p><p>Silence stretches between them for a moment as Nicky takes in the contents. Four delicate, miniature saffron custard tarts, each adorned with half a fig, perfect and glazed with thick sugar-syrup.
</p><p>Nicky stares at them, then the tip of his tongue flashes out as he licks his dry lips. A faint, dusty flush rises on his cheeks. "Is your mind still in Sarzana, my heart," he murmurs, turning his eyes  up to Joe again, "or just on Ottavio tonight?"
</p><p>Joe lifts one of the tarts out, balanced between two fingertips, and holds it forward. He raises an eyebrow, waiting.
</p><p>Nicky knows this game. He doesn’t even bother to move his hands, only leans forward and watches Joe, unblinking, as he bites into the offering. Then he closes his eyes and makes a pleased noise, licking a crumb into his mouth. The tiny fig seeds crunch between his teeth. He swallows. "Our descent into rapturous hedonism."
</p><p>"What do you remember?"
</p><p>Nicky opens his eyes, stark and icy green-grey even in the dim lamplight. "He taught us how to make love to one another," he says languidly, gazing up at Joe with a sweet expression, "And he taught us how to <i>fuck</i>."
</p><p><i>Have you ever put your cock in another man, Yusuf?</i>
</p><p>Goosebumps prickle down Joe’s arms.
</p><p>Nicky reaches up and tangles his fingers into Joe’s wild curls. "Do you remember that first time?" he asks softly, tilting his head to the side as he regards his husband. "When you had me like this?" He pushes his legs wider, letting Joe settle heavier between them, tilts his hips up so there’s no mistaking what he means by it.
</p><p>Of course Joe remembers the first time he fucked Nicky. Of course he does.
</p><p>He remembers having Nicky beneath him just like now, naked and spread out on the expanse of the silk coverlet. Ottavio was seated next to their bed, as he always was on nights like that, legs crossed at the knee, glass of wine in his hand as he gently talked them through what it meant to be a lover. 
</p><p>They had been doing this for weeks, letting themselves drift further and further into physical pleasures. They had asked for Ottavio’s help in this, too—and he did. Never with lewdness or the expectation of reciprocation or benefit from it. He spoke to them quietly, evenly, with strange understanding in his eyes, and soothed away whatever lingering shame or embarrassment they might have felt at knowing each other’s—and their own—body in these ways.
</p><p><i>Have you ever put your cock in another man, Yusuf?</i>
</p><p>Nico had answered for him with a low, bitten-off moan. "<i>Please</i>—" he said, sinking his fingers into Yusuf’s curls.
</p><p>Yusuf couldn’t resist—he pressed his palms to the unmarred skin of Nico’s spread thighs, dragging his hands higher, leaving trails of white in their wake. "I don’t want to hurt him," he uttered, eyes fixed to the spectacle of Nicolò at his fingertips.
</p><p><i>You won’t, caro. Not if you take your time with him and do it right. It can be the best feeling in the world, to be had that way by the man you love.</i>
</p><p>And then without an ounce of hesitation, Nico reached down and closed his callused hand around Yusuf’s cock. "Please, Yusuf," he repeated.
</p><p>Yusuf groaned and buried his face against Nico’s neck wondering, how—<i>how</i> could he ever deny this man anything? He would pluck the sun right out of the sky if Nico asked it of him, spend eternity worshiping his love by night like this. He would do it, he would do it.
</p><p>"Anything," Yusuf uttered, "Everything, my heart."
</p><p>He took Nico to pieces under Ottavio’s low, even instruction. Drew Nico’s long leg up to rest over his shoulder so he could kiss the inside of his knee and work his body open at the same time. The sounds were obscene, Nico’s skin growing slick with sweet almond oil as he squirmed and tossed his head back and forth on the pillows. Then Nico cried out and twisted up off the bed, eyes wide, body pulling tight around Yusuf’s fingers as they found something within him. "What—" he gasped out, "<i>What—</i>"
</p><p><i>He’s ready for you, Yusuf. If you are ready.</i>
</p><p>"Yusuf," Nico whispered, eyes soft with such adoration as he gazed up at his lover.
</p><p>Yusuf leant down and bumped their foreheads together. "You will tell me if I hurt you?"
</p><p>"You won’t," Nico replied. "But, yes."
</p><p>And then Yusuf had pushed inside Nico’s body for the first time and watched, enthralled, as the love of his many lives unfurled beneath him, opening himself wide and arching into the strange, new pleasure of it. Nico bit his sounds back, lower lip pinned beneath his teeth.
</p><p><i>You have such a beautiful voice, Nico. Sing your evening Vespers for Yusuf, hm? Let the man you love hear how he pleases you.</i>
</p><p>"Oh, <i>god—!</i>"
</p><p>The moment that obscenity spilled forth from Nico’s lips, Yusuf had come so hard he’d whited out for a moment. He came back to himself a few minutes later in a loose, sticky sprawl over Nico, his face smashed into Nico’s sweaty neck, trapped in a tangle of long limbs. They were alone in the room together, Ottavio’s chair empty.
</p><p>"Yusuf?" Nico croaked, stirring against him. He turned enough to press their damp foreheads together for just a moment. He kissed the tip of Yusuf’s nose. "You are awake now?"
</p><p>"Nico—are you—was that good for y—" Yusuf grunted in surprise as he was shoved onto his back, sinking deep into the mattress as Nico’s weight settled atop him.
</p><p>"<i>Again</i>," Nico demanded of him, wild-eyed. "I want it again."
</p><p>They had toasted to Ottavio’s memory that time in Malta.
</p><p>Joe sets the bakery box aside and pushes Nicky’s hair back from his face. "How is your head feeling tonight, habibi?"
</p><p>"You want me to sing for you?" Nicky is smiling at him, pupils dark. He turns his face to the side and kisses the inside of Joe’s wrist. "Is that what you are asking me?"
</p><p>"I just want to know how you’re feeling," Joe says with affected innocence.
</p><p>Nicky sits up and peels his shirt off.
</p><p>"Fuck, Nicky," Joe groans at the sight.
</p><p>Their bodies aren’t immune to stress and hunger. Joe keeps more muscle, but Nicky’s broader in the shoulders—and has a transcendently luxuriant triumph of an ass, which hasn’t taken a day off in nine-hundred years, Joe likes to remind him. Nicky’s still the lankier one between them overall, but in the last fifty years or so, he’s gotten just a bit of softness around his middle. 
</p><p>Joe loves it. Loves it more than anything. It drives him wild with happiness and desire to see Nicky’s body like that, because it means <i>comfort</i>. It means Nicky isn’t going hungry, that he has time for rest, for leisure, and that the two of them aren’t constantly living on the run. Right now Nicky’s a little too much hip bone and ribs for Joe’s comfort, but he’ll fix it. He’ll fix it.
</p><p>"Let me take care of you tonight," Joe says.
</p><p>Nicky’s expression is thoughtful for a moment, considering Joe with the same sort of intensity he uses to calculate the perfect angle for a long-distance kill-shot. Then he softens and pitches up to kiss the tip of Joe's nose. "Please."
</p><p>There’s nothing gentle or hesitant about it, not like that first time. Joe gets Nicky on his knees and fucks him from behind, a hand planted on the back of his neck to press him down into the mattress.
</p><p>Nicky is out of his mind for it, it’s been so long since they’ve done it like this. The sounds he makes are obscene, maddening, his long hands clutching for purchase at the sheets before he finally just crosses his arms over his head and <i>braces</i> as he takes it from Joe. Any other time and place and Andy would be pounding on the wall right about now yelling at them to shut the fuck up.
</p><p>The thought throws Joe out of his own head and his pace stutters for a moment, breath catching in his throat. He doesn’t know if Nicky notices, but Joe hauls him back by the hips and fucks him deeper just in case he did.
</p><p>Afterwards, he groans from somewhere deep in his ribcage and sinks into a full-body collapse over Nicky’s sweaty back.
</p><p>"I know what you are doing," Nicky says into the pillow, far too cogent this soon after an orgasm.
</p><p>"Oh?" Joe asks lazily, cheek smooshed between his husband’s shoulder blades. He feels languorous, syrupy-slow in his own haze. "What’s that, priest?" he mumbles.
</p><p>"<i>Up</i>." Nicky blindly swats backward at Joe until he can twist and squirm around to lie on his back in the tangled nest of their sheets. "Feeding me. Spoiling me. Making me all—<i>idle</i>," he says, "with sex and junk foods."
</p><p>Joe settles his weight down again, arms folded on Nicky’s stomach so he can watch him. "Relaxed," he says. "Not idle."
</p><p>Nicky’s clear gaze flitters over Joe’s face, brows drawing down in concern. He cups his husband’s stubbly jaw and rubs his thumb under the shadow beneath Joe’s eye. They’re deepened under the bedroom’s thin, incandescent lamplight. "I am healing, Joe," he says, so understanding and soft that it stings Joe’s heart.
</p><p>"You can heal faster," Joe protests. He shoves his face into Nicky’s hand and mutters, "<i>Should</i> be."
</p><p>"Your symptoms lingered for weeks after Córdoba," Nicky counters. "This is not usual for us." 
</p><p>"It’s not the same thing."
</p><p>"True," Nicky says with a half-smile. "I regrew the very top of my spine and you regrew nearly the very rest of yours. You toppled like a baby horse the week after you had your legs back. I thought it was very cute."
</p><p>"Only you would think like that," Joe mutters.
</p><p>"Yes," Nicky says. "If you had done that on the battlefield, I might have found it endearing and spared your life those first few times."
</p><p>"If I had done that out on the battlefield, someone else would have gutted me long before you did, and I would be lying here in bed with some… <i>Gioacchino</i> or <i>Andreo</i>, or something."
</p><p>"Impossible," Nicky sniffs. "You would have always been mine, in any world."
</p><p>"Hmm, you sure?" Joe wiggles his finger in Nicky’s bellybutton. "Andreo sounds very sexy."
</p><p>Nicky reaches to the side of the bed, still glaring imperiously at Joe. He fishes out a second custard tart from the box they’d abandoned on the nightstand. "I will kill him," he says around his mouthful.
</p><p>Joe could purr with satisfaction every time Nicky gets possessive like this. "I love it when you talk sexy to me, baby," he growls, then drops a kiss onto Nicky’s belly when it shakes with laughter beneath his cheek. Then he licks Nicky’s fingers clean and things devolve from there again.
</p><p>He wants to wring everything he can out of Nicky that night. They haven’t had sex since before Morocco—not between everything that went down with Booker and Merrick, and not while Nicky’s recovery was still a glass-frail thing.
</p><p>Joe fucks Nicky again, slow this time, pressed up behind him the same way they sleep—until Nicky gets impatient and shoves Joe onto his back, holding Joe’s shoulders down and climbing on top so he can take exactly what he wants.
</p><p>Joe should have known—he should have known that nothing escapes Nicky. A thousand years at the other’s side, and Nicky can read odysseys within Joe by the sound of his breath. He knows he’s got Joe at his weakest and most vulnerable, knows he can do and say whatever he wants and all Joe can do is lie there and take it.
</p><p>"You are so good to me, my heart," Nicky murmurs, his weight heavy on Joe’s lap. "I am not a poet, but I could tell you all those things I love about you like this, yes?" He’s working himself in a slow grind now, back and forth in small increments that make Joe’s eyes roll into the back of his head. "That every breath of air in my lungs is a prayer of thanks for having found and been found by you?"
</p><p>Joe makes a wounded noise and has to close his eyes. He clutches desperately at Nicky’s hips. "Nicky, <i>please—</i>"
</p><p>"Look at me, my love," Nicky bids him, then goes still and takes Joe’s face between his hands until Joe obeys him. "Look at me and think about me like this every time you hear my voice, and remember that every word I speak is possible only because it is carried upon my love for you." He leans down to kiss the taste of salt from Joe’s face.

</p><p><br/>
</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
</p><p>Joe wakes up to find his arms are empty. The slant of moonlight coming through the window tells him it’s still deep into the night. The faint, cherry-glow visible through the balcony doors tell him where his husband has gone.
</p><p>Joe walks silently but the door creaks on its hinge when he nudges it wider.
</p><p>Nicky is slumped in one of the wooden deck chairs, bony feet propped up on the metal balcony railing. A cigarette smolders away between his long fingers. His eyes are closed and his cheeks are damp with tears. Nicky doesn't open his eyes, doesn’t say anything or move his head from where it rests against the seat. He just lifts his arm and offers Joe the cigarette.
</p><p>Joe takes it, takes a long drag. It’s a shared vice they’ve both kicked in the past few decades. Sometimes they slip. He sinks into the chair next to Nicky’s, face drawn with worry.
</p><p>"I am okay," Nicky mumbles.
</p><p>Joe can be a patient man when he needs to be. When Nicky is lost in his own mind as deeply as this, there’s no good that comes from forcing him out of it.
</p><p>They sit in silence for a time, listening to the susurrus of water and rock, the faint crackle of burning paper as they pass the smoke between them until it’s down to an ashy nub. Nicky stirs and fishes out another—of how many, Joe doesn’t know—from the crumpled packet under his chair. He lights it, eyes fluttering as he inhales deeply, and then sighs out a long plume of blue-grey smoke through his nose.
</p><p>"The lab came back to me tonight," Nicky finally says. "I remembered you screaming at those doctors because you were in so much pain. I begged them to stop. I thought they were punishing you for what you did to Merrick. But then the doctors did not stop even after you fell unconscious, and then I thought maybe they were punishing me."
</p><p>Nicky’s lip curls—it’s fast, just a flash of white teeth and viciousness before the expression fades again. "I would have torn them to pieces if they had so much as taken you from my sight," he says evenly. "Every last one of them who had laid eyes upon you in that place. They would have fallen to their knees and thanked Nile for her bullets, if they had known the deaths I had waiting for them."
</p><p>People have mistaken Nicky’s kindness and gentleness for weakness. Many of those learned the hard way that, though the limits of his goodness are vast and generous, once they are crossed—Nicky kills with such precision, brutality, and detached coldness that he unsettles even Andy at times. 
</p><p>Joe holds out his hand. 
</p><p>Nicky tries to pass him the cigarette, but Joe just snuffs it out and twines their fingers together instead. A thousand years and this ridiculous, stubborn man of his will still try to suffer in silence. 
</p><p>"You could have woken me up," Joe says gently.
</p><p>"Didn’t I?" Nicky asks with that strange, wry smile of his. "But, no. You need your rest too."
</p><p>Without letting go of Nicky’s hand, Joe slides off the edge of his seat and nudges Nicky’s feet down from the railing. He settles himself on the floor between Nicky’s knees, gazing up at him with soft eyes. "Fool man," he murmurs adoringly, and lays his head in Nicky’s lap with a deep sigh. "Then let me."
</p><p>Above him, Nicky sniffles. His fingers are trembling as they wind through Joe’s curls, smoothing them back from his face, grazing over his cheek, his jaw, his throat. Finally the weight of Nicky’s hand settles on the crown of Joe’s head, his arm coming to rest around Joe’s shoulders to keep him close, a tight fist wound into the cloth of Joe’s sleep shirt.
</p><p>They sit that way until the sun comes up.

</p><p><br/>
</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
</p><p>Another few days pass. 
</p><p>Joe paints and Nicky reads, watches his laptop, potters around the little house with coffee, goes to sit down by the beach, naps off his headaches and lingering fatigue. The Mediterranean summer is sweltering, their days long and heat-shimmering languid. It seems to Joe that the world is settling around them, just a bit—taking on some flavor of normalcy. Finally. Finally.
</p><p>More so when Joe comes back from Genoa one evening to find Nicky in full form in the kitchen. In a rumpled, oversized button-down that used to be Joe’s, sleeves rolled up, barefoot, tea towel flung over his shoulder. The countertops are a mess of garlic peels, chili peppers, and cherry tomatoes. Nicky’s good mood fills the whole room.
</p><p>Joe sinks into a kitchen chair and watches, besotted.
</p><p>"<i>Pasta all’assassina</i>," Nicky says over his shoulder, before Joe can ask. "It is a new recipe. I saw a video for it on YouTube and I want to make it for Nile and Andy. For the joke."
</p><p>"A recipe you didn't know? Nicky!" Joe feigns affronted shock, hand pressed to his chest. "What kind of Italian are you anymore? You would forget your culture so easily?"
</p><p>"Al-Kay<i>san</i>i." Nicky turns and brandishes the wooden spoon at Joe, splattering tomato sauce on the tile floor. He’s killed many, many people with much, much less. "I am <i>older</i> than the culture. I am the <i>judge</i> of the culture," he insists with affected gravitas. "Culture must come to me and ask if it is good enough to be Italian, and I will decide."
</p><p>Joe howls with laughter.
</p><p>"I am a good judge," Nicky continues. He pokes the air with the spoon. "I let the tomatoes in, yes? Said no to worthless things like Corombo and penne lisce, did I not?"
</p><p>Joe is laughing so hard now his eyes are watering. "Alright," he concedes, snorting and wiping the corners of his eyes. He rocks back in his chair and holds his hands up in a gesture of defeat. "You were right, I was wrong. You win, nonna."
</p><p>"Good," Nicky says primly, clearly fighting his own smile now. He turns back to the old stove. "I want a fancy espresso machine. <i>Those</i> are Italian culture."
</p><p>That sets Joe off again and by the time he stops laughing his sides are sore and dinner is ready. He feels like his emotions are shaken loose, all those things he’d been keeping knotted up tight inside his ribcage since London. To see his Nicky laughing, see him happy and relaxed—it does things to Joe.
</p><p>"<i>Forget my culture</i>," Nicky murmurs as he sets their full plates down, not quite ready to let the joke go yet as long as it’s making Joe laugh. "Ti mostrerò la mia cultura, <i>saraceno</i>."
</p><p>Joe catches Nicky’s wrist and pulls him in for a quick kiss. Then he reaches out to squeeze a handful of Nicky’s ass, grinning. "Mi prometti?"
</p><p>"<i>Sfrontato</i>," Nicky murmurs against his mouth, eyes going a little heavy. "Of course." 
</p><p>Dinner is wonderful, because it always is when they have the leisure to devote themselves to it. Things are easy, relaxed, and the feeling of ease and normalcy lingers heavy and happy in the air between them like the scent of Nicky’s cooking.
</p><p>Nicky clears the table while Joe goes to poke through the cabinets. "Did I buy <i>stelle</i> cookies last week?" Joe asks over his shoulder, "Or am I imagining that?" 
</p><p>"Y-Yus—"
</p><p>Joe turns right as Nicky’s wine glass shatters on the tiles. Nicky follows it, cracking his head against the side of the table with a splatter of blood as his legs give out.
</p><p>"<i>Nico!</i>" Joe throws himself across the kitchen and collapses at Nicky’s side, sweeping broken glass out of the way just as clonic convulsions set in. The sound of Nicky’s breathing turns ugly, ragged, torn between clenched teeth as his limbs jerk and spasm.
</p><p>"It’s alright, baby, you’re okay, you’re okay—" Joe babbles, falling in and out of a dozen different languages. He supports Nicky’s bleeding head with his hand until he can stretch to get one of the chair cushions instead. "You're having a seizure, you’re gonna be okay—"
</p><p>Nicky’s nonreactive, eyes rolled back in his head and foaming saliva splattering through his teeth, enough to choke his breathing, pink from where he must have bitten the inside of his cheek. Joe pushes him onto his side, caging Nicky’s spasming body loosely between his own shaking limbs—just enough to keep Nicky from hurting himself.
</p><p>Joe’s eyes are stinging and he’s breathing almost as hard as Nicky—the second he can see Nicky’s body start fighting back to heal, the tears finally well over and he lets out a pained, bitten-off noise. "Come on, hayati," he pleads wetly, "Wake up for me, Nico, wake up—"
</p><p>The convulsions taper off. The cut on Nicky’s temple closes over. Slowly, Nicky’s gasping eases and evens out—and when he finally blinks with renewed awareness, clumsily wipes away the mess from his face, and murmurs, "Sono qui, s-sono qui…"
</p><p>Joe fractures. His expression shatters and an ugly, grating cry breaks through his teeth. He curls over Nicky’s body, pressing his face into the man’s shoulder, groaning against the strain of grief inside his ribcage.
</p><p>"Joe," Nicky says hoarsely. "Joe, please—it is done, it is over—"
</p><p>"It’s not—" Joe pitches back, fury rising hot to join his terror. "It’s not fucking over!"
</p><p>Nicky pushes himself up onto his knees. His hair is blood-plastered against the side of his head, collar and shoulder soaked with it as he reaches forward for Joe. His hand slips in the smeared puddle of it and he fumbles.
</p><p>Joe groans at the sight and presses his fists against his eyes, breath hitching. "Not again," he utters, face contorted in a pained grimace. "Not again, not <i>fucking</i> again—I can’t look at you like that, Nico—"
</p><p>"Joe," Nicky says with gentle urgency, "I am fine. I have healed. The worst is over."
</p><p>"It’s not, Nicky, we have to live with this shit for another fucking <i>century—</i>"
</p><p>Something shifts in Nicky’s expression. "Joe," he says quietly, so carefully that Joe almost resents him for it, "I am not asking you to make peace with what Booker did, but the wound is still too new, we are still too close to this—"
</p><p>"He’s <i>family!</i>" Joe snarls. "We’ll never be anything <i>but</i> close to it! We’re all each other have! And if we can’t trust Book, then what? <i>What?</i>" He scrubs his hands furiously over his wet face, growling out a frustrated noise into them. "He can fuck me over all he wants and I can deal with it, but you—Nico, it’s <i>you</i>. Book took himself from us, but then he tried to take <i>you</i>. He just fucking <i>gave</i> you to them!"
</p><p>Nicky scoots forward, blood soaking and broken glass sticking to the knees of his trousers. He reaches out to grip Joe by the arms, fingers digging into his biceps with bruising strength. "<i>Joe</i>."
</p><p>Joe’s expression breaks, tears coming steadily now. "How the fuck am I supposed to forgive him, Nico?" His voice wavers and cracks, growing thick. "How the <i>fuck</i> can I do that, when you can’t remember the night you proposed to me here, but you can remember the sound of my screaming in that lab?"
</p><p>Fuck. <i>Fuck</i>, he wants to be sick.
</p><p>"Oh, Joe. <i>Yusuf</i>," Nicky says, heartbroken. "What of your own suffering? I would give up all of my memories gladly just to know that you would be safe. If I woke up tomorrow and could not remember a single thing, I would only fall in love with you all over again for a thousand years and more."
</p><p>There’s nothing reassuring about that when Nicky has blood all over his face. Joe’s eyes flit to the tacky blood on the edge of the kitchen table and he chokes. "We’re losing our <i>family</i>, Nicolò—we’re losing—" He feels like he’s been torn open, the grief and the terror of it all pouring out of him. "Nico…" he pleads. "Nico, I can’t—I can’t—"
</p><p>Can’t think, can’t speak, can’t see anything but Nicky’s skull blown open on a concrete floor.
</p><p>Darkness swamps him, pours into his ears until his ears until he can’t hear, fills his throat and his lungs, viscous and cold and clinging, until he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, <i>he can’t fucking breathe—</i>
</p><p>Joe wakes up on the floor, lying on his back with his head pillowed in Nicky’s lap. His eyes feel salt-crusted and swollen. His body feels beaten, bruised.
</p><p>He sees Nicky’s face above him. Always above him in moments like this, eclipsed with worry now. Joe thinks about that moldy, underground cell in Còrdoba, waking up to the feeling of thick liquid dropping onto his face, the shrieks of his captors fading until the only sound left was the drip of their pooling blood seeping through the basement ceiling. 
</p><p>He remembers the taste of it as he laughed in manic relief, knowing his love had come to save him. His love will always come to save him.
</p><p>There’s no blood in the kitchen or on Nicky’s face anymore. It must have been bad, for Nicky to have had time to clean up like that. 
</p><p>Nicky cradles his head, leaning forward over Joe the way Joe had leaned over him in the lab. He’s down to his t-shirt and Joe can feel a kitchen towel wadded under his neck. Maybe to cover the stains on Nicky’s pants, so Joe doesn’t have to see them. 
</p><p>"Yusuf? Are you back with me?"
</p><p>"It’s too much," Joe croaks. "It’s too much, Nico."
</p><p>"I know, my heart," Nicky says gently, stroking his thumbs up and down Joe’s temples. "We made it out," he says, speaking in Arabic now, his voice soft and his sentences simple. He’s never been able to shake his heavy accent in any language, and he knows Joe loves the sound of it so he doesn’t try very hard. "We are on the other side and we are still together, my love. We are safe, and you do not need to carry the burden of this alone."
</p><p>Joe shakes his head, makes as if to protest.
</p><p>"—Shh," Nicky soothes him. "Listen to me. Our family has been hurt, but it is not broken. Our family is <i>not broken</i>. We will take the time we need to heal and to rest, and then we can look to mending things beyond our own selves."
</p><p>"Andy—"
</p><p>"Is alive. Andy is still alive. And if it truly is her time to go soon, we must have the grace to accept what is beyond us, my love, and to cherish everything we are given up until the very last moment."
</p><p>"I’m not ready to let her go." Joe hates how weak he sounds. Pathetic.
</p><p>Nicky just sighs and strokes Joe’s hair. "Me either."
</p><p>"I don’t know how to forgive Booker. I don’t know where to start."
</p><p>"You do not have to know," Nicky reassures him. "You do not have to start anywhere except where we already are, together."
</p><p>They sit on the kitchen floor, quiet as they let the tension and emotion drain away. They shuffle only enough to get Joe seated against Nicky’s chest and held fast there. Joe grounds himself in the sound of Nicky’s heartbeat, the steady rhythm of Nicky rubbing his arm. The sound of the sea, the distant radio and the ebb of flow of people’s voices lost on the breeze.
</p><p>Joe breaks the silence at last. "Since you woke up on that floor, I have died a thousand invisible deaths from my terror," he mumbles into the crook of his husband’s neck. "Every lingering hurt you endure, I think—<i>is this it?</i>"
</p><p>Nicky sighs and noses at Joe’s hair. "We had our first death together, and we will have our last death together," he says evenly, steady in his conviction.
</p><p>"You can’t promise that."
</p><p>"No, but it is something for which my faith is unyielding, and I have faith enough for the both of us," Nicky says with gentle finality. He kisses Joe on the cheek.
</p><p>Later, he draws Joe a bath that smells like rosewater—one of the unchanging scents that has followed them through the centuries. Joe sinks into it and nearly wants to cry all over again for the memories that brings back—of Sarzana, Tunis, Malta.
</p><p>Nicky leans against the side of the bathtub, fingers trailing in the water, head tilted back to rest against the wall, and sings to him—<i>Nicolò</i> sings to him, to Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad al-Kaysani, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2071ds0B2ko">something haunting and austere in ecclesiastical Latin</a>. Older than even the both of them, sung now to Yusuf from a time before this plea for holy succor transformed into a war chant before the walls of Jerusalem. 
</p><p>Nicolò’s voice resonates against the ceramic tiles of their little bathroom in Camogli, and when Joe closes his eyes, he can finally imagine the sound of it echoing across a thousand years in that ancient, stone church.

</p><p><br/>
</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
</p><p>Joe feels like shit when he wakes up the next morning. 
</p><p>Sore like his joints have turned to rust, head-aching, scoured from the inside out. The bed next to him is cold and the curtains are drawn tight, and when he swats at his cell phone on the book-cluttered nightstand, he sees that it’s nearly noon.
</p><p>He hears Nicky pottering around somewhere out in the house, clattering pots and pans. Just as well—there’s a complete downpour outside. Summer storms in Italy are otherworldly in their violence.
</p><p>Joe drags himself through the shower and into a clean pair of joggers and mismatched socks, shrugging into one of the dozen oversized button-downs they share without bothering to fasten it properly. His skin still smells faintly of rosewater.
</p><p>A steaming glass of mint tea is waiting when he shuffles into the kitchen, Nicky at the oven with a scorching hot baking tray in-hand. He’s wearing the dumb crab-claw oven mitts Booker got them back in the seventies after Joe’d called him <i>crabby</i>, and then completely lost the joke explaining what it meant. It’s been a running gag in the family since then. Joe refuses to have feelings about that this morning. 
</p><p>His heart aches with love, though, when he actually sees what his husband has waiting for him. "Caro," he says, "When did you even get chickpea flour?"
</p><p>"Sit," Nicky orders him briskly. He nudges a cookie and hisses while he fumbles it onto a plate for Joe. They’re buttery <i>ghraiba homs</i> and Joe can smell the lemon zest wafting up from them, just the way he likes them best.
</p><p>Nicky at least puts the baking sheet down before he leans over, cupping Joe’s scruffy face between his warm oven mitts, and gives him a deep, full, closed-eye and open-mouthed kiss. It’s absolutely filthy and wet and any other time would lead to a whole lot more for breakfast than cookies.
</p><p>"Good morning," Joe says against Nicky’s mouth, a little dazed.
</p><p>"I love you," Nicky says, smiling bright enough to fill the kitchen with light the sun can’t that morning. "Let’s go to the house in Sidi Bou Said."

</p><p><br/>
</p>
<hr/><p><br/>
</p><p>They make a week of it.
</p><p>They’ve been through these places hundreds of times throughout hundreds of years, but Nicky still pokes around the tacky, colorful gift shop on the ferry to Corsica. He buys postcards for Andy, buys Nile a fridge magnet in Cagliari, and texts them selfies of him and Joe on the ferries, trains, ports, cafes, and nameless roadways between Genoa and Tunis. An elderly Swedish couple in Trapani asks if they’re newlyweds, and Nicky just smiles sweetly, kisses Joe on the cheek and says, "Yes, we are on our honeymoon. This man is the love of my life."
</p><p>Nicky likes telling people that. He does it whenever he can.
</p><p>It’s early evening when they finally arrive in Sidi Bou Said, asking the taxi driver to drop them a ways off so they can walk the distance of the cobbled streets. 
</p><p>Their home here is smaller than the one in Camogli. And much, much older. It’s one of a long, ambling line of buildings perched atop the ancient town’s steep hillsides. All with thick, white stucco walls and wooden-doored balconies, painted in the same brilliant shade of lapis, that face out towards the Gulf of Tunis. Their house is open and airy, full of bright white sunlight and warmth. They have neighbors on both sides—whenever they’re in town, Joe drinks tea with them in the mornings and Nicky, besotted, coos and feeds up Mrs. Dbouk’s fat orange tabby, Mignon, from his own palm.
</p><p>The granite flooring on their ground level has been time-worn down near to the slickness of soapstone. They have a walled, rear courtyard. Yusuf planted jasmine vines there two hundred years ago and they still flourish, welcoming the men home with their perfume heavy and sweet in the summer air. 
</p><p>Nicky hauls open the heavy courtyard doors and greets them like old friends.
</p><p>Somewhere far in the distance, a muezzin is singing out the evening call to prayer over a loudspeaker. Joe hasn’t observed salat in centuries, but the sound of that is visceral; it reverberates right to the very heart of him. The singing of prayers, the rich and heavy jasmine-and-saltwater breeze, the constant, dry rustling of date palms, Nicolò’s humming while he pokes around their house. These are the sounds of home, these are the sounds of <i>Yusuf</i>.
</p><p>Joe remembers this place as a child, watching the water from somewhere near this angle. His oldest brother lived nearby with his wife and children. He ran a cloth stall in the market, part of their father’s vast trading business. Yusuf remembers hiding and climbing among piles and piles of vibrant carpets, stuffing his hands into bolts of rich silks, sinking his little fingers into barrels of smooth glass beads, just for the sensation of it against his skin. He remembers traveling here with his father, the heat and stuffiness of the shop, the surrounding <i>warmth-laughter-safety-love</i> of his family. 
</p><p>Joe can’t remember his old family’s faces anymore, but when he sees the line of the water and tastes the warm air, closes his eyes and lets himself be still beneath the weight of Tunisia’s summer-setting sun—he almost can. He almost can.
</p><p>Nicky presses up behind him, winds his arms around Joe’s middle. He huffs softly, a meaningless, happy noise muffled into the cloth of Joe’s linen shirt. Something within Joe’s heart settles, eases into a contentment that is different, but just as precious to him, and bound into his very soul the way the earth of this place is.
</p><p>"I love you," Nicky murmurs, nosing at his collar. "What should I make for dinner tonight?"<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
[the end]<br/>
<br/>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p><br/><br/>Scusami! / Sorry!</p><p>Mio eroe / my hero</p><p>Sole mio / my sun</p><p>Gli Innamorati a Sarzana / Lovers in Sarzana</p><p>Per la tua ragazza? / For your girlfriend?</p><p>Per l’amore assoluto della mia vita, [...] Mio marito / For the absolute love of my life [...] My husband</p><p>Bene, bene [...] Torna tra quattro ore / Fine, fine [...] Come back in four hours</p><p>…nonna / grandma</p><p>Ti mostrerò la mia cultura, saraceno / I'll show you my culture, saracen</p><p>Mi prometti? / Promise?</p><p>Sfrontato / Cheeky<br/><br/><br/>&lt;3</p></blockquote></div></div>
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